Les impressions successives : jardins, musique et temporalité dans The Elements of Criticism de Henry Home, Lord Kames

Abstract

In The Elements of Criticism (1761), Lord Kames explains that the fine arts go 'hand in hand' and that the same standards are used in all of them. Though he does not specifically compare music with the art of gardening, one may logically expect his theory of gardening to be related to his conception of music. This article suggests that it may indeed have been the former which served as a model for the latter and that landscape gardening was used at the time as a kind of general metaphor to conceptualize the arts and assess artistic merit. Rejecting the geometrical structure of the formal garden, Kames insists on the importance of variety resulting from the succession of different impressions in time. He advocates natural simplicity and therefore criticizes the excess of ornaments in the opera. Finally, we suggest that, while the digressive acquired primary critical importance in the aesthetic theory of the period, music failed to live up to the model of freedom expressed by landscape gardening, and that the theory of the sublime grafted upon Handel's music may have been partly to blame for it.